Have you made yet another New Year’s resolution to lose weight? You may want to check out Gary Taubes’s Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (Knopf, 601 pp., $29.95), which I wrote about in October www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/. This isn’t a diet book but one that investigates many of the claims that underlie other diet books.

Based on an exhaustive review of the scientific research, Taubes argues that obesity “experts” have demonized fat on the basis little or no evidence. Refined carbohydrates, he says, are a greater threat to health. And those fat-free brownies may hurt you more than foods that have more fat but fewer carbs. “Dietary fat, whether saturated or not,” he concludes, “is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.”